Following an Open Call for applications, the BFE is delighted to announce that Dr Henry Stobart will become the new co-editor for our flagship academic journal Ethnomusicology Forum (EF), which is published by Taylor & Francis. Henry will work alongside co-editor Dr Shzr Ee Tan, and he has released the following statement about his incoming editorship:

“I will be delighted to replace Abigail Wood in 2019 as co-editor, together with Shzr Ee Tan, of Ethnomusicology Forum. My connection with this very fine journal goes back a long way. It was in 1994 that my first ever journal article was published in the third issue of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology. In those days, only a single issue of the journal was published each year. In 2004 the journal was renamed Ethnomusicology Forum, and two issues began to be published annually (rising to three in 2008). This reflected the journal’s increasing global reach, alongside the dramatic expansion of ethnomusicology in the UK.  Such growth in the journal’s frequency is, admittedly, daunting from an incoming editor’s perspective, as is the long line of excellent and often very innovative former editors. But the progressive and interdisciplinary approach of the journal is also inspiring, and a tradition to which I look forward to contributing. The ‘ethnomusicology’ in its title (despite, or maybe because of, all the problems surrounding this term) continues to challenge us and make this an ongoing project. This is an area of scholarship in which we cannot possibly sit back smugly and feel we have constructed a safe and secure disciplinary citadel, or have the possibility of some kind of analytical closure. Looked at another way, maybe we are just engaging with what goes on in the broader world around us, and inevitably this will continue to keep us on our toes…

“My former editing and co-editing experience is mainly with books. This includes the interdisciplinary volume Sound (Cambridge University Press, 2000) edited with Patricia Kruth, and the collection Knowledge and Learning in the Andes: ethnographic perspectives (Liverpool University Press, 2002) with Rosaleen Howard. More familiar to ethnomusicologists are probably my edited volume The New (Ethno)musicologies (Scarecrow, 2008), and the recent volume Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media (University of Rochester Press, 2017), edited with Thomas Hilder and Shzr Ee Tan. I’m also currently guest editor, together with Michelle Bigenho and Richard Mújica, of a special issue of the online journal Transcultural Music Review, focused on heritage making in Latin America. This journal, which includes articles in English, Spanish and Portuguese, which has covered many very interesting and critically engaged themes is often surprising unfamiliar in Anglophone circles.”

Henry will take up the editorial post in January 2019 when the current co-editor, Dr Abigail Wood, completes her term of office. The BFE would like to publicly thank Abigail for her tremendous work on the journal over the past three years, and we send her our very best wishes in all future endeavours. Article submissions to Ethnomusicology Forum can be made via the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/remf20/current